What is InPrivate?InPrivate is the Cloud Software dedicated to Private Equity Firms and Venture Capitals, but easily used by Business Advisors, Legal Firms and other companies for keeping track of their Deal Flow and their Fund Raising processes. Custom modules are also available for Investor Accounts Reporting, HR Assessment, and more. See www.inprivate.info for details or read our features flyer.

What about Services? We'll give you all the support and the advice you need for starting up with InPrivate and we encourage you to ask for new features.

InPrivate will help you optimize for efficiency, save time, reduce stress and increase customer satisfaction. Do you know any reason to wait more? Sign Up for Free today, or contact us​

Some major features have been added last month following our customer requests. We are excited to describe the new benefits that have been put in place recently:

the Dropbox integration is now fully running.

you can now open a new Deal just by sending an e-mail with an hashtag to InPrivate.

the Task Report, for easily tracking, who's in charge of what and what tasks has been completed on time.

New enhanced permissions for viewing the documents related to each Deal.

Tha contact detail page now shows a list of "Related Deals" and "Related Contacts" for each contact

You can now add an Activity to a Deal from the Calendar

Don't wait, Create a Company Account, your first user is Free Forever. You'll be able to add more users whenever you want according to our Pricing page.What is InPrivate?InPrivate is the Cloud Softwarededicated to Private Equity Firms and Venture Capitals, but easily used by Business Advisors, Legal Firms and other companies for keeping track of their Deal Flow and their Fund Raising processes. Custom modules are also available for Investor Accounts Reporting, HR Assessment, and more. See www.inprivate.info for details or read our features flyer.

What about Services? We'll give you all the support and the advice you need for starting up with InPrivate and we encourage you to ask for new features.

InPrivate will help you optimize for efficiency, save time, reduce stress and increase customer satisfaction. Do you know any reason to wait more? Sign Upfor Free today.

"A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol # ... Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it." (from Wikipedia)

Hashtags are extensively used on social networks, but they could be helpful for your business, too. Imagine to keep in copy your Deal Flow Management System while writing an e-mail related to to a specific activity you've done you just want to send to your team: by including a specific hashtag as your deal's identifyer, your system will parse it and will add it to the activity log of the deal.

inPrivate Deal Flow Updates your deals by parsing your e-mails and seeking hashtagsinPrivate has now this hastag parsing feature for inbound e-mails: try it by subscribing for a free Trial here.

We are excited to announce a new major release of inPrivate Saas with unlimited support for permissions and roles on the users of your organization; you will share your deals only with specific users assigning different privileges to let your team members view or edit each information.

Your confidential information will be shared only betweeen limited groups of users.

The new Dealflow also supports:

Improved task management to assign a task to any contact from inPrivate CRM

Unlimited email alerts for the tasks (you can send alerts to any contact, including non users)

If your company is an Advisor in the Private Equity Business, is a Venture Capital or if you are in any other industry, the use of checklists for managing your projects is very common. So, there's nothing new with the use of the checklists itself.

But depending on how you use your checklists and on how much you are accurate in your approach, your results will be different and the time you could save could vary a lot.

You have a huge experience and a long track record of Deals in the Private Equity Business, you are a M&A Advisor or you manage a Venture Capital Fund, so you should use your knowledge (and a bit of your time) to identify the common tasks for each category of the Deals that you know.

You probably consider each Deal unique, with a lot of unattended events, and you know that the key variables to succeed are 'soft', due to the ability on creating relationships, on understanding other's intentions, negotiation, and so on. So: managing a Deal Flow is not like building a car in 1930. True.

Anyway, you'll have a lot of benefits by seeking a formal (and flexible) model; more than a schema is possible, but let's now analyze the checklist approach:

- Choose the set of stages your deals could have (i.e.: Screening, Live, Success, Broken, etc)- Identify the macro categories of your deals (i.e.: M&A, IPO, etc...)- For each category, create a checklist with a list of Tasks. This is the key and the most difficult task; try to focus on the type of tasks you could have in the category and write down some instructions specifying the input and output for each task, such as writing/signing a document, meeting with contacts and so on. Always create an 'End' task to mark the checklist as finished.- Identify wich tasks require to manage a list of contacts to be completed. In a task focused on finding customers or investors, you should iterate on a list of prospect contacts and you should do some action for each one.

Then you should instantiate your checklist model for your real world. How? And how to keep it flexible/adaptive? Try it using a spreadsheet, but keep in mind that you can't manage more than a few complex deals in Excel without confusion; some hints:

Write down your model in excel and try to check it with some past deals

One Deal can have more than a checklist of different categories (ex.: Raising + Acquisition); your choice of categories should be modular to build a unique mixed checklist for each deal.

Do not allow to change a task-name inside a checklist

Allow a different sorting of the tasks on the same category

Allow parallel tasks

Allow to delete a non-useful task from a checklist

Identify and exploit cross links between deals (i.e. the same contact could be involved in two or more deals)

Let me have your comments.

On inPrivate Software we recently introduced a flexible way to manage checklists and tasks inside the deals, Sign Up for free here, learn more about inPrivate Software or ask for a Demo here.

Before giving you some details about our last updates on the budget management process for private equity deals, I should explain what is the “working version” of the Bid Budget on inPrivate Systems. Our users can add a Bid Budget for a specific deal, adding “rows” to a specific version. Each row, upon the completion of the process, will become a real contract with an advisor, and it contains the type of the service (Financial Advisory, Technical Avisory, etc), the name of the Advisor and the budgeted retainer and success fees. When the budget is approved by the board, the system freezes this version, but the user can open a “working version” of the Bid Budget based on the last approved version. This version is useful because users can “adjust” the budget values within the constraints imposed by the board.*The main constraints are to not exceed the overall amounts approved by the boards, neither the total retainer, nor the retainer plus the success amount.Other constraints could be on the amounts for each row of the bid budget; for example, if the amount approved for a single Advisory service is greater than a specified maximum amount, the user can't change the name of the consultant and he can't input a greater amount.Users can't modify the budget row if the relative contract is signed. If it's necessary to force a new update on the budget, they should restart the workflow of the contract, so the the approval process restarts for that contract.Another improvement is that the entire budget now has its own workflow; when the users marks the budget as “approved from the board”, the entire budget is sent through the system to a member of the board, to let him certify that it’s the right version that it was effectively approved by the board.

If you’re interested in a demo or in a Trial Version of inPrivate Systems, please request it here.

(*) Usually the board approves also a buffer amount to be used for later adjustments of the budget.